• Baltimore MD, Basement Standing "Desk"
• Prompt: https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_innovating_to_zero
• current CO2 ppm: 420.12 ppm

Shit, this was from TED2010!? So bill gates says that energy and climate are the most important to the kinds of people that the Gates Foundation helps…

As we make energy cheaper we have to contend with the constraints of releasing too much CO2.

Innovating to Zero. it is important. We have to stop emitting CO2.

• CO2 = P * S * E * C
  • P > people
  • S > services per person
  • E > energy per services
  • C > carbon dioxide per unit of energy

We're not going to do anything about the people, we want to help people, not purposefully get rid of anyone. Services, well, we need to increase health, education, utilities, etc. to all people. We can do something about E and C. P and S will increase for now, P might start to go down in the next decades, if other things can be done positively!?

unbelievable scale and unbelievable reliability

Investigate more: Bill Gross > eSolar, Vinod Kholsa, Nathan Myhrvold

• 2020 > 20% reduction in CO2; by 2050 we need 80% reduction in CO2?
• 2020 > zero emission investigations; by 2050 need zero emissions tech deployed everywhere

So Bill Gates' wish for "one important thing by 2050" was that "something that gives us energy for half the cost AND no co2 gets invented" – this is the highest impact…

• More basic research funding
• market incentives to reduce CO2
• Entrepreneurial opportunities
• rational regulatory frameworks

Innovate to zero. Useful goal, useful objective way to measure "success"

20 years to invent, 20 years to deploy... we've spent 10 years of that invention budget, are we doing okay?

If you make it make economic sense, then it doesn't matter if it makes climate sense. Is that a rational approach to take? why talk about the climate at all then?

≠≠≠

What did I learn from that accidentally 10 year old video? what questions for design does it bring up? Does it again provide objective criteria for helping define or evaluate "good" designing?

I mean, for sure, graphic designing that helps with Gates' checklists is "better" designing then. AND oh man, that drive energy per service down, the drive CO2 per unit of energy down, variables in the equation of "net zero" are good design metrics. What materials to spec? what processes to spec? how to power my laptop? whether or not to even use a laptop? These all become important things.

How might new projects fit into this smartly? Are my "spontaneous lamps" good project exemplars for this? how about the precious plastics tooling? what about just our silly yard and house conversions? How can things that I do as gestures showcase these other kinds of innovative thinking and working and the other future possibles that are available? That's what Bill needs right? If we want to innovate to zero we also have to VISUALIZE the alternative possibles for people to excite them about innovating more and faster and better!?

• Baltimore MD, Dining Table
• Prompt: Who said eco-friendly needs to look eco-friendly? / https://www.are.na/block/11699665
• current CO2 ppm: 419.73 ppm

Eco-friendly. This is a kind of shorthand for "Environmental Sustainability." I think it has some semantic issues; it can easily be used incorrectly; but, it is understandable to people in a way that other things – sustainability, restorative, etc. – aren't.

Define: Eco-friendly

• not environmentally harmful (Merriam Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/eco-friendly)

So, if something is not environmentally harmful, does it bring along a different set of aesthetic judgements since a different set of manufacturing and material judgements have been used? If the normal way of making and transporting and selling things IS environmentally harmful, what's an environmentally un harmful capitalist machine for making, transporting and selling? Do the visual aesthetics that have helped create our current situation need to be abandoned or replaced along with all the other systems?

Cradle to Cradle outlines a situation where most of the systems in terms of commerce and society stay the same, but the tools, materials, systems, processes for manufacturing are totally transformed. In that system, well, some aesthetics would by their very nature change, some materials wouldn't exist, some structural, built forms would have to be abandoned due to energy waste, material squandering, etc. but most of the wrapping, most of the signs on substrates, they could probably stay the same. There's a slightly different message to communicate, but in the end, the goal is the same, make more, sell more, get happy and fitter and more successful through consumption, but let's just make sure its the right consumption. [Need to cite some things for this, probably would need to elaborate on my point, not just flippant].

But is that possible? is that desirable? Eco-friendly it may be in theory... How does that change if more commons based practices are utilized?

A Tesla is perhaps a good example. Teslas are meant to look like cool contemporary cars. They are designed to take advantage of and add too contemporary luxury car culture. This is a status symbol that you own. This is about individual ownership. This is about speed. While a Tesla might be eco-friendly compared to an equivalent luxury gasoline sedan, the goal of being faster, the goal of being shinier, the goal of being nicer, the goal of replacing cars 1 to 1 with this other "better" car are not. These ideas are still about more, these ideas are still about the past and present ideas of what a car is for, what constitutes coolness in cars. That in and of itself is not eco-friendly. Real eco-friendliness is no cars right? or foraged bamboo pedal and wind powered wheeled vehicles… Where do Tesla and Polestar fit into that ideal? How can you design a system that after existing for a little while designs itself out of existence? a car that through being sold replaces OTHER people's cars! This is sort of what services/ownership models like Lynk+Co do – you individually buy the car, BUT! you can lend it to other people in your network easily.

Okay, but that's not about aesthetics right – What kind of cars look eco-friendly? the solar powered ones? the EV1? the little things like Smart Cars? For buildings and cars where there are objective forms for measuring more or less energy wastage aesthetic choices can be tied to other important choices… or rather are the outcome of other choices. How does this work in choosing a typeface or image or page size or paper stock? How do all of those choices lead to new or different or alternative visuals.

What does eco-friendly look like in the first place? does everyone picture green leaves and brown paper and hand written lettering? do people picture sleek modernist forms indicative of big tech like Apple and Stripe who promote their "eco-friendly" choices heavily? IS eco-friendly looking synonymous with crunchy, granola-y, burlap of old?

Why do I always get hung up on this idea. Why can't I let this go? Why must I have an answer for this quandary?

• Baltimore MD, Dining Table
• Prompt: https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/about/projects/global-warmings-six-americas/ / saved here: https://www.are.na/block/10168641
• current CO2 ppm: 419.64 ppm

Okay, so how does this help one be a better climate designer? a better sustainabilitist? a better designer period?

MISSED THIS ONE!

020210606, Baltimore MD, Dining Table

• Prompt: Rehash 020210604, Who said eco-friendly needs to look eco-friendly?
• current CO2 ppm: 419.76 ppm

So why do I get hung up on the aesthetics question, on the what do things look like hill? it is because of IDEOLOGY and how art, how visual culture communicates IDEOLOGY through its visuals.

What something looks like tells you something about the ideology(ies) it represents or it desires to come from. Modernism as a style HAD an ideology at first, the way it looks come from radical ideas about society and art and design's place in society...

the best for the most for the least.

Okay, so eco-friendly looking things should have an agenda. Or rather an eco-friendly agenda should result in a specific kind of style that then visualizes eco-friendliness.

1. I believe this to be true. Forms represent ideologies.
2. However, if your only goal is form making, you can just replicate forms and accidentally (or purposefully) remove them from their ideologies.
3. You can make something appear to have an ideology by utilizing a form from a specific ideology – using "urban" graphics like graffiti, etc. to make your high end sneaker "edgy" or whatever.
4. There are more complex ways to grasp "what something looks like" however, and we need to migrate this conversation that way.

I get hung up on the form part of things. But I forget, form is a subset of content, and that is a subset of context. So, we need to look at contexts, we need to look at interconnections and audiences and messages and whatever else and let that lead us to forms.

This is a good time to just go into the form <> content <> context discussion. That needs a write up too! (Andrew Blauvelt reference; Ellen Lupton? did she ever talk about this at large or just to us in grad school? what else do I say about it? oh, Christopher alexander has a lot about it in notes on the synthesis of form and more.)

Once you have forms that represent ideologies though; you really easily get into territory where the form disconnects from said ideology – or is transfigured to represent a new or different ideology.

I find this complicated in the world at large. For example, small social enterprises that are designed to look the same as a giant corporate bank... what to do about this? where else to look for new forms? how to not appropriate something else incorrectly? can new forms be constantly invented, is that even worthwhile or sustainable? what does eco-friendly look like? even that is a good question. is it the stereotype – crunchy granola brown and green things – or is it that the "looking eco-friendly" is because all the eco-friendliest choices were made for materials, processes, etc. and whatever form that manifests, that is what eco-friendly looks like; and so that might be malleable for different quantities of something; or different kinds of projects result in different "forms" despite them all being eco-friendly?

Does this get harder or easier once you get into "design for the welfare of all life"?

transition to my various versions of my Nebraska talk from March 2021. What other ways did I try to explore and explain this? how can I illuminate all of that previous thinking more effectively?

Sustainable? FLOSS?

How does one move towards a more sustainable graphic design practice?

• Part of my solutions are transitioning clients, materials, etc. towards “better” options;
  • what "better" means is relative of course, but in general lower energy, less materials, safer materials, etc.
• my GNU/Linux (F/LOS generally) experiments are another;
• Reusing old design ideas another. (Design-A-Days; Kit-of-Parts)

One might ask if spending hundreds of hours trying to relearn a workflow and tooling in GNU/Linux is sustainable (the general open sourcery is SOOOO much work to transition too)? But! I am more than capable of reusing much older computers in this realm, so there is a possibility for not having to get NEW computers anymore?

The GNU ecosystem is fully into reusing old ideas — just reusing ideas period.

The ecosystem for libre tools is more like a natural ecosystem: evolution; variations due to minor differences of philosophy or habit or desire; a plurality of solutions… If the way our tools are built and evolve is more like natural cycles/processes; does that allow those tools to fit into our lives, society, and culture in more "natural" ways? (natural meaning finding harmony with nature; being more "a part" of nature rather than "apart" from nature).

Do the ideals of F/LOSS align with the ideals of sustainability?

Does "all humans and other life should flourish" fit into F/LOSS as an ideal?

• go into flourishing?
• Bruce Mau's design for the welfare of all life
• get some blurbs from my Towards Sustainable Aesthetics essay?

Where and how do my interests in Design serving a flourishing/welfare of all life agenda and my interests in F/LOSS overlap; how are they additive; how do they serve each other. Are they negative or at odds with each other?

• Our current capitalist constructs DO NOT improve the welfare of all life;
• the origins of F/LOSS are anti-capitalist — or at least anti valuing making a buck over the good of your neighbor — so, if you have to use software, F/LOSS is more likely to AID you in helping all life flourish than proprietary/non-free softwares. (Is this provable? or measurable?)

Waste = Food

Free software can allow for more creative waste to become creative food. And, WASTE = FOOD is a sustainable ideal. So, does that make free software more sustainable?

Waste = Food; what other ways can I find that this is true for creative kinds of waste? As I mentioned before I think that in some ways F/LOSS improves upon this equation.

Is this also how vernacular patterns/building come into the picture — are free/libre open models the new vernacular (is that how I make my designing today more like the way say a Cape Cod house comes together?)

Waste = Food is a great idea to apply to more things than just the natural world. Here's a great prompt: the earth's major nutrients are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, & nitrogen ... what are graphic design's major nutrients? (and! how can they be cycled and recycled into new graphic design indefinitely?)

Dunne and Raby propose that design should explore activities and outcomes that question and challenge status quo industrial agendas—however! for the most part the designers doing this are still using status quo tools! Sustainability (at least the flourishing variety I am interested in) is NOT the current status quo; so if I am challenging the assumptions of contemporary design and capitalist consumerism, then I need non-capitalist consumerist tools to do that with—enter F/LOSS.

Sustainable Graphic Design is a mindset, not a checklist of "the right" materials

• If you have the right mindset, but still use the wrong materials, does it matter?
• If one uses better materials, but for the status quo aims, does it matter?
• In what ways can I change how I work and live to yield immediate results?

Sustainable graphic design does not exist.

Sustainable graphic design does not exist. that might mean "there is no such graphic design that can count as sustainable — its all wasteful garbage that does nothing good" — or — sustainable graphic design doesn't exist meaning that it comes together to serve a communication purpose; deliver a semiotic message; and then redistributes back to whatever energy and matter it was before.

The point is not that literally you can't make it (though that is sort of what I was thinking at first), but that a graphic designed thing that is sustainable comes together to communicate the message it needs to communicate; and then can dematerialize back to its initial parts once the communicative need is over. How does "signs on a substrate" translate to "pieces coming together for a determinate amount of time and then returning to their constituent pieces"

Sustainability is about knowing what you want to sustain. Libre tools are about a person's freedom to do what they want. If I don't want to sustain our moderno-techno-capitalism, then I should probably use libre tools while creating alternatives... what do I want to sustain though? It is easy to say what I don't want to sustain; less clear to say what I do want to.

If sustainable designers don't make design; what do we make? who do I need my next clients to be? If I am all in on the sustaino-libre stuff; what are the kinds of things I must investigate? And, how does being a "graphic designer" play into all this when/if/as my projects become more about software development; more about building bicycles; more about actions or interventions; more about proposals and plans?

I know I like to say how the sustainabilitist principles project exemplifies "sustainable design does not exist" since the objects came together to be a sculpture for an exhibition and then went back to being the objects afterward — but how does that work for other kinds of projects? can I work with clients and still pitch that kind of solution? (do I have examples????)

Should sustainable design look intentionally different to tell everyone that its not the same? If the paradigm must shift; then the styles should probably shift as well to be clear that they are in all ways different? By just using different tools and typefaces and image sources do you do this? does it need to be more extreme than that?

What is perennial graphic design that is restorative to culture — that protects and builds cultural health? (the same way that prairie grasses build and protect the soil health of the plains?)

What does "graphic designing" do to heal and restore the world? how can making anew unmake all the old?

What are local and reusable materials for visual design? making my own paper? creating sheets of remade plastic "paper"? digging and making my own clay to make tablets out of? firing pages that way? what do I produce with those things? plates to print from? stamps? seals? do I draw and compose right into clay? what else allows me to put "signs on substrates" in a meaningful way that continues to let me "graphic design" but really does something about material usage; education; communication; etc???

Am I a sustainable designer? or am I a sustainable person that happens to design — everything I design is thus influenced by my sustainabilitism.

What is the goal of "designing." If everything is a design project; is making new forms important; isn't just fixing what needs fixing an example of "good design" — does the solution need to be novel? (If I design and sew a traveling silverware roll using salvaged cloth and found silverware is that any less of a design project than designing a new folding "hobo knife"?) IF the answer is no, it's not different, then wtf, what am I doing, what am I teaching? If the answer is yes, it is different; do I want to be a "designer" then? Why not just a vernacular crafter or builder? Is this counterculture modernism? Whole-earthers did some things like this right? Zomes? Papanek's coffee can radio? A lot of reuse; but with the goal of making things people need in the moment? Still new things; but a repurposed or reconfigured materials based on what is at hand; what is readily available? What is design: making things we want? making things we need? Solving problems? what problems? whose problems? What does it take to let "sustainability" or "restorative design" take a hold in mainstream culture/society? does it need to be more of a religion? more of a political party? Do there need to be more movies or kids shows or whatever that fully embrace doing something about climate change as their theme to affect a change? Regular TV news? obviously the current journalism does little. Why? What else can I speculatively brainstorm? science fiction books are a plenty. Can we make this a WWII like "war effort" to fight the evils of climate change? Reframe everything in the context of us against the greenhouse gasses — C02 increasing is the same as the Nazi's winning Europe? What other ways of framing this are there? I need to try more! That's another potential win for Graphic Design — communicating this in as many ways as is possible.

How does graphic design take carbon back out of the atmosphere? what can communication design (meaning what can signs on substrates) do to get carbon out of the air and into the ground? to keep carbon bottled up? does making bricks of plastic and then shaving them into paper help? does making my own paper from used clothes and scrap paper help? what else can I do??? just picking Risograph isn't enough. Just buying some renewable offsets isn't enough. How does this bake into designing generally? to design pedagogy? to society at large?

Stabilizing the climate isn't about reducing emissions, we have to _zero_ our emissions. Instead of just lowering things, we need to stop completely and then actually remove carbon from the atmosphere. Driving an EV doesn't cut it. replacing a car w/ a used bicycle & your lawn with a permaculture garden is a much better start.

to change a system; intervene in small ways around the edges ... at some point that system will react to those changes and be made to change ??? small is not less important than big in a complex system.

Designing Tomorrow's World Today: What design does this; what did the messaging around Ozone depletion look like? What about Carson's _Silent Spring_ related anti-chemical rhetoric? what about WWII "we need you" type things? Oh man, that's a great resource — war time propaganda posters. Does that stuff work now? what is cultural convincing design now? what is design that causes people to follow and just do?

Survival of the most generous interconnected groups.

life-affirming design thing.

Every graphic design problem's answer is not a book; or a poster; or an identity... it is not necessarily a visual design problem; superficial 2D surface decoration isn't the answer to every problem — though the thinking of a designer might reveal an interesting solution still... Can it always be framed as signs on substrates (signs on surfaces?) even if not a visual "answer"?

if sustainability is a cyclical, restorative, resilient, flourishing, non-anthropocentric, maintenance-based, stewardship, co-existing thing...... what? you cannot expect everyone to understand what you mean by sustainability — so do we need other words; or do we just need to say that we mean all those other things when we say sustainability. it is a shorthand sign for all those other words...

Design is about connections. Design is about bringing people and ideas and problems and solutions together.

Design only works when it is trying to achieve a success for the planet; for the welfare of all life.

We do not have unlimited energy. We do not have unlimited resources. How does this change our relationship with designing? With capitalism? with our economic ideals?

What do I want to sustain? What does the welfare of all life really look like? really entail? How do you actually design for this? What kind of design challenges structural inequalities and balances equity, ecology, and economy? Design that collaborates so as to create lasting, positive change in one's community?

Writing for 30 minutes a day is turning out to be complicated. I am not good at reserving time for anything I just tack it all on at the end. This is not sustainable.

If design only works if it is trying to achieve a success for the planet, then in general design is always failing.The laptop I write this on is a disaster; my home I write from a scar on the land. What destruction has my life and my constant need for energy and resources caused? how do we make amends? how does design make amends? what is the goal? designing away design?

I'm not making it today. My mind is empty.

Journal or essay?

what is the point of this exercise? to generate content? to clarify ideas? to what end? for whom? Is this useful for me or for others? who is my audience? designers? or general people? Practitioners or academics?

I watched part of _Jurassic Park_, this idea that we're meddling with things we still can't grasp or understand; that our earth's systems are beyond our control and we need to stop trying so hard to be the Earth's rulers... that all resonates.

Maybe I need some better plans or constraints for this? like not just picking a prompt, but trying to find something that needs more explaining? trying to find something I feel that I don't quite understand or can't quite explain and that could be better illuminated?

I need to do some stretching. Yoga everyday, writing everyday, where is the time for building legos with one's kid! How to give up other things for the common good? not just materials, resources, but wasted efforts, wasted time. How to read again? when did I last finish a book? so sad. That's not sustainable either!

how do I make this more usable? more searchable? more reusable? more build-upon-able? do some of these things end up as their own documents? their won essays? is it worthwhile to keep absolutely every thing in one foolishly gigantic text file?

do I need new clients? new ideas? new directives?

Are there exemplary designers doing this in a way that I find aspirational? I mean there are the occasional projects that come along that I say "wow" too; but actual design practices? Perhaps Sanctuary Computers?

Also, what is this: https://theopenbody.com/

How can I make this more usable, refernecable, make the ideas build upon each other more AND end up more shareable out in the world at large as I work on it? how can I then easily post things on medium and such too!?

Okay, what if I write these in a tiddly wiki? I can then make each day's effort a tiddler; ideas can be cross referenced; shared definitions can easily be added/created/evolved. I can then also figure out how to make it a live site! and maybe even host it on my own little pi server on the local network, and then figure out port forwarding to get it live from the house!? That could become my own litle solar powered web server.

So, that sounds like a good thing to try the next several posts – make this a tiddly wiki. I'll add all that here to this repo i guess? then its easily shareable across my machines until I figure out how to get a little raspberry pi server going.

The rest of this 1/2 hour will be spent setting that up I guess!

Okay cool. TiddlyWiki appears to be working. And I have it installed on my Linux machine and the mac machine via node.js instructions. Coolio. We'll see how this goes as a way to write and interconnect more!

What do we want? what do we need? What can I do to have a plan? make a plan? do more? do less?

The goal for our house? carbon neutral by 2025, carbon negative by 2030? how does one get there? and just the house? what about our f-ing lives? What can graphic design do to help with this? why am I caught up with this label? why stuck feeling like a graphic designer? why not artist? why not maker"? why not just person?

I am a Person Doing Person Things. How do I just go about being okay with that?

Why do I waste time on things that don't matter. Like trying to make custom styles for things like slack and my tiddlywiki? is it worth it really!? come on.

How can I make my OOKB palette more accessible? higher contrast? how to make it more usable, more reusable, through the constraints of accessibility. Is this a learning opportunity for me? is this a "sign signaling sustainability" of some sort or another?

this project isn't going very well. Why am I so negative? do I have adhd? am i depressed? how does one find this out? I guess you just ask doctors? is procrastinating doing that a sign that one has those things? why procrasticnate how does my mind make thiese connections? why do I ogo over and over again on the same things, while also going out and out again on wild goose chases???

Can I please get to anything I actually hope to? The plastic stuff!? please! crhis how do we proceed?!?!

• Signs Signaling Sustainability
• Everything Is Connected
• People Doing People Things
• The Sustainabilitist
• Flourishing
• These Gestures are Undoubtedly Utopian
• The Long Now
• Culture
• Society
• Taste
• Vernacular
• Future Possibles
• Alternative Possibles
• Alternative Futures
• The Designer as Sustainabilitist
• What other common things do I say or use that could be defined more clearly?

This wiki can quickly turn into something useful from a class/sustainabilitist perspective.

Stuff that would be cool to do and get done: * reach out to various people in Baltimore I could foreseeably help?

Why think that far into the future? What is useful? if we look 10000 years into the past do we see anything resembling that far off thinking from before? Do indigenous communities think this way? there is the 7 generations thing, that's not 10000 years, but its at least a 150 years into the future!?

10,000 years ago (8,000 BC): The Quaternary extinction event, which has been ongoing since the mid-Pleistocene, concludes. Many of the ice age megafauna go extinct, including the megatherium, woolly rhinoceros, Irish elk, cave bear, cave lion, and the last of the sabre-toothed cats. The mammoth goes extinct in Eurasia and North America, but is preserved in small island populations until ~1650 BC.

10,000–9,000 years ago (8000 BC to 7000 BC): In northern Mesopotamia, now northern Iraq, cultivation of barley and wheat begins. At first they are used for beer, gruel, and soup, eventually for bread.[48] In early agriculture at this time, the planting stick is used, but it is replaced by a primitive plow in subsequent centuries.[49] Around this time, a round stone tower, now preserved to about 8.5 metres (28 ft) high and 8.5 metres (28 ft) in diameter is built in Jericho.[50]

10,000–5,000 years ago (8,000–3,000 BC) Identical ancestors point: sometime in this period lived the latest subgroup of human population consisting of those that were all common ancestors of all present day humans, the rest having no present day descendants.[51]

(from wikipedia)

The interesting part of thinking 10000 years in the future – or the past – is that it is a moving target. As we move forward in time, 10000 +/- is also fluid.

But if we think about 10000 old people and societies; well; the difference between us and 10000 years ago us is pretty staggering. So, trying to presume what 10000 year future us might be like, well, f, that is hard. So what is the point of a group like the Long Now Foundation? Why try to think this far in the future? Can we out think natural cycles that we don't seem to be able to understand or control? can we look back 10k then SEE some patterns, and try to use that to predict? Do we say, what COULD things be like 10k in the future and then invent the things we WANT for that future instead? (Future Possibles)

Brian Eno likes to say, when asked about Long Now, well, have you ever thought 10k years into the future before!? THAT's why we're doing this. It isn't necessarily about solving anything, but about forcing people out of their thinking patterns, get us out of short term immediate thoughts, actions, objects, into mcuh much larger, longer ones. Even a sky scraper for instance, that wasn't actually invisioned to last even hundreds of years? did any architect when designing a fanciful apartment megaplex think, what might happen with this structure 50 years from now? 100? 500? 5000? Does anyone think this way about anything they create?

If there is a project with Sue Spaid and Patricia Johanson this type of thinking will have to be an important part of the project: how does time affect design? Signage for an outdoor environmental park? one way would be "indestructible" objects, things meant to last forever! but! as we can surely see from our own histories, unless something is hidden away, it doesn't really last forever. Some rock with elemental clay pigments on it in a cave sheltered away can last tens of thousands of years, there is some graphic deisgn with longevity, but some signage outside in the elements? that needs a different thought process. How can they grow? evolve? adapt? be reborn as nature ravages them? Instead of man vs. nature and a nature proof solution, was is a with nature solution? are there kinds of plants that can be grown to BE the paths? can we train some trees or shrubs to outline where to walk, what direction the next things are in? to grow into benches for visitors?

So, what about my own house? my own work? something useful in thinking 10k in the future is – if there should be no trace of me, then F, how do I make sure there is no trace of me? how to I stop using 10k+ life materials – like terrible plastics – and embrace more natural and long term but correctly degradable materials? I should probably stop resin-ing and spray foaming everything right? My tree posts!? do they have a lifespan that matches the trees? fruit trees don't usually live a lot longer than a couple decades, the posts should last about that long, and replacing them with something metal or whatever instead would be easy enough – or even just starting to replace them yearly with new foraged bamboo?

• Ephemeral
• Life Cycle Assessment
• Building Materials

in How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand does talk about how all buildings around the world used to use about 250 materials or something, and now (or at least in the 90s when he wrote is) there were like 10000 different materials... that's probably useful to mention or dig into more somewhere? right? like do all creations have this issue now? so many new and different and technical materials, things with little to no connection to natural cycles or common maintenance or easy replace-ability? What ramifications does this have for graphic design? home life? our future selves? our 100th generation in the future ancestors?

I've got nothing today...

I am trying to figure out how to show some links to and from things on these tiddlers, but when empty nothing shows...

I am also trying to figure out how to build a cool dynamic list of all the prompts I've used, so far that is a bust too.

I also wish to point out that "signs signaling sustainability" could be a direction to take some of this web stuff too? does that become its own prompt? how to explain everything as a potential SSS!?

How do I preset journals to have the requisite fields for my rambling writings?? is there a way to standardize the answers?

this wasn't really a writing day as much as a figure out some cool tiddlywiki things – is that getting in the way now of actually trying to write anything! ugh. Always the procrastinator

Compare Sustainable GD with non-sustainable GD… do we first need to define Sustainable? Do we need to define Graphic Design? Is Status Quo synonymous with non-sustainable? I mean, it is right now — but so the goal would eventually be Just Design and Bad Design.

What would be comparing? clients? outcomes? materials? processes? tools? energy sources? all of the above?

Instead of adjectiving design with “sustainable”, we need sustainable design to just become design and design of today to become bad design.

How does that conversation start? how does coursework evolve to reflect this? what to do with all those old text books?

Places that explore this idea:

• The Total Beauty of Sustainable Products by Edwin Datschefski

Ideology and design. Political action and design.

I am sitting here wishing that I could use more and other and different tools. Why only for my frivolous flights of fancy do my "other" tools work? I can use TiddlyWiki and GNU/Linux and Inkscape for my own pursuits, but I never end up using them for client projects – why!?

And, why F/LOSS To begin with? Why should I care if something is Libre or not!? is "free" vs. proprietary, open versus closed? How does that fit into sustainability if at all?

Sidenote: these aren't really essays, sorry to say, but they are random thoughts, that sometimes get explained or further opened up!? Now, how to use them? and why make this open? License?

If Everything Is Connected, F/LOSS and Sustainability have to be tied through some set of steps. Some Six Degrees of Separation sort of thing.

I was led to open source BY sustainability. I was led to free as in freedom because of climate change concerns. In the thinking I have found useful for my Sustainabilitist Principles, connection to open work, vernacular systems, learning from the past and what is around you, reuse, replicating, etc. have all been there.

I initially went to find open source fonts. I read Ellen Lupton's Free Font Manifesto probably when I was starting grad school? I was also thinking that if true sustainability had to account for all sorts of social responsibiity and work around the globe, we needed more adaptable systems – part of this was fonts in more languages, and one of the few fonts I found was open source!? As well as the idea that we might have access to more things than others, so can we make more tools, solutions, and culture shareable and accessible and adaptable. Anyway, this led me to open fonts. Which was funny, as I had gone all in on Drupal already, and was singing the praises of open source from the perspective of web code, tools, tech...

Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn felt like it was really about open source technology. These vernacular buildings Brand was analyzing, these were free as in freedom structures. The process for integrating new building solutions over time matches Eric Raymond's analysis of Linux development – a group of people working together to find and solve bugs; when one person solves the problem, everyone gets the solution!

Where does this start to live in visual design? in sustainability at large? in climate design? in sustainable graphic design? in signs signaling sustainability?

So, Free/Libre Open Source is necessary for Sustainability. Natural systems aren't proprietary right? countless animals have covergently evolved similar traits, tenrecs and lemurs in madagascar for example filling niches that all kinds of other mammals evolved to fill elsewhere... The difference I guess is that they don't intentioanlly share that information; they just over time adopt the same "solutions" because any creature can get htere, and once there are penalized by the creatures that already got there???

Natural systems vs. capitalist ones? vs. human ones? how do we learn from natural systems, but then speed up the sharing or co-evolving? Where does adaptability and resilience come in? what things HAVEN'T been resilient? what have? Jellyfish as a species have; ferns as a species have; arachnids as a species have? what do we learn from them? how does one survive an exitinction event? how does one quickly evolve usefully? how does one re-shape themselves to their environment? how might we instead reshape our world for ourselves? or for the welfare of all life?